The Fall Guy: Putting the Action Stunt and Center

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt in The Fall Guy

My screening of The Fall Guy was preceded by one of those awkward “Thanks for coming to the theater!” inserts, in which its star (Ryan Gosling) and director (David Leitch) informed the audience that the picture we were about to watch was conceived as a valentine to the stunt community. This, like pretty much everything else in the movie, was an example of overkill, given that its opening scene is a quick-hitting montage of classic stunts (including, if my eyes can be trusted, a glimpse of Leitch’s own Atomic Blonde) while Colt Seavers (Gosling) narrates about stunt performers’ invisible, invaluable contributions to the motion-picture industry. You half-expect the film to pause after each elaborate action sequence so that the doubles can be identified by name and thanked for their service.

So, not subtle. But to a certain sect of nerdy cinephiles (who me?), the themes advanced by The Fall Guy are significant and noble. Much like the most recent Mission: Impossible entry, it mounts an impassioned and convincing argument in favor of tangible, handwoven artistry. The cockamamie plot may manufacture a number of human villains, but the most pernicious force on display here is the blue screen that looms in the background of the film-within-the-film climax. For all its winking modernism, this is essentially a classic movie about good and evil—one where the heroes insist on shooting everything with practical effects while the bad guys proclaim, “We can just fix it in post.” Read More

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Challengers: Thirst Serve

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mike Faist, Zendaya, and Josh O'Connor in Challengers

One of the first times we see Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) in Challengers, she’s clad only in black lingerie, the camera observing her backside in a manner somewhere between appreciative and exploitative. Empirically, it’s the most skin we see in the movie, yet from the characters’ point of view, it doesn’t represent Tashi at her most alluring. That comes later (really earlier, in the film’s chronology), when two admirers are watching her play tennis at the junior U.S. Open. As she trades ground strokes with an overmatched opponent, they gawk at her combination of power and grace. “Look at that fucking backhand,” one of them whispers, in an awed tone that suggests a repressed teenager who just caught a glimpse of Pamela Anderson in Playboy.

It seems diminishing to characterize Challengers, the riveting and ravishing new picture from Luca Guadagnino, as a sports movie. Sure, it follows the entwined lives of three gifted tennis players, but it’s more about their emotional cravings than their physical exploits. Yet it doesn’t treat tennis as mere window dressing. Instead, it captures the ineffable appeal of sports—the cathartic thrill of competition, the rigor of perfecting one’s craft, the blurry line between passion and professionalism—and binds it to the characters’ omnipresent hunger and vulnerability. There are all sorts of games being played here, and some have nothing to do with rackets. Read More

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Sasquatch Sunset, Ungentlemanly Warfare, and the Risk of Originality

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Eiza González in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare; a scene from Sasquatch Sunset

When it comes to intellectual property, cinema doesn’t operate in absolutes. There are great superhero movies and also terrible ones; there are great original movies and also terrible ones. Still, the franchise boom of the 2010s created an uneven playing field that lent a certain luster to smaller-scale films which weren’t rooted in comic books or young-adult literature. In fact, the continued survival of these types of pictures is what makes me confident that the medium isn’t on the verge of collapsing, despite the constant industry doomsaying about A.I. or tax write-offs or Netflix giving Zack Snyder a billion dollars to make seven different versions of an off-brand Star Wars rather than releasing any of its #content in theaters. The movies have been at death’s door ever since their birth over 100 years ago. They just never seem to die.

Currently, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe dwindling in dominance and audiences rewarding more ambitious storytelling like last year’s #Barbenheimer phenomenon, there seems to be an opportunity for studios to pivot away from the IP craze and toward more original movies. But again, the mere fact of a film’s putative originality doesn’t necessarily mean it’s, y’know… good. This past weekend featured two new releases that don’t feature masked heroes, magic wands, or talking animals. At last, real movies for adults! Except, well, suffice it to say that both have their flaws. Read More

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Civil War: The Revolution Will Not Be Rationalized

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kirsten Dunst and Wagner Moura in Civil War

Something is wrong. We know this immediately, as soon as the A24 vanity card appears and bursts of noise explode from all sides, as though miscreants in the theater have set off fireworks in both aisles. We see a middle-aged white man (Nick Offerman) fumbling his lines as he rehearses a televised speech, and the ceremonial nature of his surroundings gradually reveals that he’s the President of the United States. As he yammers about secessionists—a faction he labels “the Western Forces”—the screen periodically cuts away to scattered shots of chaos and destruction. The President blusters that these rebels are on the brink of defeat, but the panicked nature of his rhetoric, along with the pointed images of mayhem, suggest otherwise. This uprising won’t be put down anytime soon.

This is the arresting first scene of Civil War, Alex Garland’s engaging, muddled, knotty new thriller. Simultaneously sprawling and intimate, it chronicles the challenges facing four people as the country around them is engulfed by anarchy and despair. Garland is no stranger to grappling with weighty philosophical ideas in the context of spiky, character-driven adventures. Ex Machina, his first and still best movie as a director, meditated on the very nature of humanity via a twisted, triangular war of wills; his theatrical follow-up, Annihilation, and his TV miniseries, Devs, both conjured dazzling worlds while interrogating their heroes’ motives and pondering their destinies. Civil War is his boldest effort yet, and also his emptiest. Read More

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Monkey Man: Punch and Broody

Jeremy BeckReviews
Dev Patel in Monkey Man

Did you know that Dev Patel looks good with his shirt off? The actor isn’t widely regarded as a sex symbol, despite some sticky fumblings with women in The Green Knight and the underrated Wedding Guest. Monkey Man, Patel’s feature directorial debut, is primarily a chance for him to demonstrate his filmmaking chops, but it also serves to showcase his well-earned immodesty. With his careless mane of black hair, a square jawline covered by a trimly untrimmed beard, and enough abs to fill a supermarket soda aisle, he’s a matinee idol with the unforced charisma to match. It’s only fair that he spends much of the movie getting his face bloodied to a pulp.

In fact, when Monkey Man opens, Patel’s character routinely receives bone-crunching body blows, and not as a consequence of any vigilantism; it’s just his job. Credited as Kid—though he also goes by the alias Bobby, not to mention the title moniker—he moonlights at an underground Indian boxing club, where he functions as (to borrow from an upcoming release) the designated fall guy, wearing a monkey mask and throwing fights in exchange for a meager cut of the take. (Given that he never seems to win a match, it’s unclear how the house makes any money, but let’s not worry about plausibility.) His earnings are commensurate to his suffering; as explained by the establishment’s oily promoter (a welcome Sharlto Copley), he needs to really wow the crowd with his injuries in order to collect the coveted “bleed bonus.” It isn’t exactly a glamorous lifestyle, but Kid’s pain is a tolerable means to a very specific end. Read More

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